


Eldritch Pleas [remix of On the Precipice of Fame: Tangled in the Budding Darkness]

by ang3lba3



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Body Horror, Child Death, Drugs, F/F, Gore, Horror, Pining, Romance, Roxy: the mom friend, Sexual References, creative liberty with eldritch abominations, red diamonds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-25
Updated: 2016-07-25
Packaged: 2018-07-26 14:52:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 17,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7578379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ang3lba3/pseuds/ang3lba3
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Calliope wins a week with her favorite band, Tangled in the Budding Darkness, and decides to create a documentary.</p><p>It does not go The Way She Expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Monday Madness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [buttmaster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/buttmaster/gifts).
  * Inspired by [On the Precipice of Fame: Tangled in the Budding Darkness](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2355641) by [buttmaster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/buttmaster/pseuds/buttmaster). 



> oh boy.
> 
> I have to thank cinnamonstrous so much for being my beta and my rock during the last throws of writing this fic. it came out so much longer than i anticipated or imagined. this whole thing is secretly a love letter to how hot and metal damara is.
> 
> buttmaster, i hope you like this!! i admire your writing greatly.
> 
> on tumblr at [this gorgeous blog ;)](ang3lba3.tumblr.com)

The sun is rising.

It dips its brush to paint golden light in xanthous swathes over the deep soft blue, and a girl sits on her porch beside a trunk and watches. She cradles her square chin with a skeletal hand, hums a song to herself as she waits.

The van is audible before she sees it, and she presumes that it must be for her. It’s not an unreasonable assumption, as her driveway is a half mile long and the road attaching is dirt and gravel. Sure enough, a few minutes later around the bend comes a van the shade of a particularly ornery eggplant. On the side is an intricately spray painted mess of tentacles and eyes, most of which wearing mascara and eyeliner in a variety of (always purple) hues. Couched among the Lovecraftian monsters are the words  _ “Tangled in the Budding Darkness.” _ Sitting behind the wheel is a stranger.

This doesn’t concern her. She’d won a week to spend with her favorite band, but she had hardly anticipated one of the members to pick her up themselves.

The woman behind the wheel skids to a stop closer to the porch than strictly necessary, and close enough that Calliope had begun to be concerned she’d have to pull an Edward Cullen and stop it with her palm. 

“Hey guuurl!” the woman says, rolling down the passenger side window and waving. “You gonna sit there all day?”

Calliope grins—lips shut, she doesn’t want to scare her—and unfolds her body to a standing position. Her jean cut offs reveal long, powerful thighs and calves; her tank top hugs to a muscular upper torso and doesn't bother to cover her thick arms. The driver whistles softly to herself, and by the way her pale skin flushes immediately afterwards Callie figures she hadn’t meant to. 

Callie doesn’t mind. Nine feet three inches of polished green exoskeleton is always impressive to humans, even to some trolls. 

She opens the door to the back of the car and delicately places the suitcase that had been sat beside her inside. It’s more of a trunk, to be honest, a broad thing that she’s had since the 1920’s. 

"Oooooh-MG. That is the SICKEST piece of luggage I've ever seen," the woman behind the wheel says, staring blatantly behind her at the well cared for (if cracked and faded) leather, the aged brass handle and rivets.

“Thank you,” Callie says softly. She always speaks softly—the slow thunder of her voice has the tendency to scare people if raised above a quiet rumble. “I got it to celebrate cracking the Rosetta Stone.”

"Oh, yeah, I've cracked that program too. It's a doozy," the woman says. "Anyways—I'm Roxy Lalonde, official manager of Tangled in the Budding Darkness, official older sister of one particular ROSE LALONDE, and unofficial mom of the REST of those girls. So, Miss Tall, Green, and Majestic—you’ve gotta be Calliope? Yes-no, insert confirmation or lack thereof right on the dotted line."

“That’s me,” Callie says with a small wave and a shy smile that almost-but-not-quite showed her fangs. Something warm glows in her chest, a hopeful little ember, at the word  _ majestic.  _

“Well,  _ Callie,”  _ Roxy says with a broad grin, “how do you feel about listening to  _ A Very Potter Musical  _ soundtrack on the way down?”

With that smile in Calliope’s direction—cheery, bright, confident, flavored strawberry from her chapstick in a way that drifts up to the flat slats on her face she calls nostrils—she has no idea how she could ever say anything except:

“I’d love to.”

 

— 

 

Over the course of the half hour drive, Calliope discovers several things about Roxy Lalonde.

  1. She can and will stop mid-sentence to crank up the near silent radio if there’s a line she wants to belt out, and will turn it down just as fast and pick up exactly where she left off.
  2. Her singing voice is like sunshine peeking through your curtains in the morning, with the distinction that the night before you had quite a lot to drink.
  3. Roxy likes to talk herself into places no human has ever gone before; she is a brave pioneer of metaphors, similes, and allusions that would make a lesser girl balk to consider.
  4. Her hair has subtle pink highlights and so do her pale eyes, her peaches and cream fingers tap out the rhythm of her words against the steering wheel, and freckles stand stark on her skin in the most endearing of ways.
  5. She really, really, _really_ likes wizards.



When they pull up to the house at last—the drive taking too long and not long enough—Callie is so engrossed in her that she doesn’t notice until Roxy winds down the sentence that had begun about her favorite type of wizard beard and migrated to her friend Nepeta with a: “Annnnd we’re here!”

Calliope turns her head sharply, and the camera as well. The majority of the drive she’s kept it on Roxy, only facing it towards herself at a particularly shocking or amusing moment. She would far prefer to capture Roxy’s smile than her own.

(When this week is over, it will be good to have this to look back on.)

(When Roxy’s long gone, like so many beautiful girls have gone before her, it will be good to have this to look back on.)

The Victorian house has aged with a sort of unfathomable exhaustion. The weariness lines every sagging plank on the porch, is in the yellowed glass of the antique windows and the peeling white paint of the siding. It sighs between blades of grass and weeds on the overgrown lawn, whispers from the scattered cigarette butts and crushed beer cans on the dirt of the driveway. When Callie steps outside of the car, there’s a scent of rotting that isn’t entirely on the plane of existence that the majority of the house rests in. No—not rotting, she decides upon another breath. 

_ Despair.  _

“So! What do you think!” Roxy says loudly, bouncing up in front of the camera. Her sudden appearance startles Calliope, who had been so engrossed in the aura of the house that she didn’t even sense Roxy. 

Normally she had a very good handle on tracking people’s energy around her, but not this time, and it forces a surprised little growl out of her that makes Roxy giggle.

"This is home sweet home for your upcomin' up 24/7,"  Roxy says, spreading her arms wide. It should have been a motion that inspired welcoming in Callie’s thoughts. All she can think of are crucifixions. "The girls prolly ain't up yet, buuuuut we should get started on breakfast anyways 'cause Jade's an early riser. Come on in and follow me, and you'll be in a world of imagination. Plus pancakes."

Roxy turns halfway, beckons for Calliope to follow her, and this time she does think of welcoming. She thinks of another girl, centuries away, who had blonde hair too, who said  _ come in,  _ who offered a wooden cup of water for a weary soldier. She thinks of the way her freckles looked against her skin, fawn brown spots blended almost perfectly with tanned skin, and the blood on her pale throat when Callie woke up the next morning and her brother went to sleep.

Calliope stops thinking, and walks inside.

The porch creaks under her weight, wood buckling in alarm, but she’s over it quickly enough and it’s left to settle back into place with a groaning reluctance.

Inside is— 

Well, Callie isn’t sure what she was expecting, after the disturbing exterior. In fact, she isn’t sure if this wasn’t exactly who she would have expected from Roxy’s home had she not been so occupied with old memories.

They stand in a small entryway with a short hall ahead. The wallpaper has a background the color of watered down brine, roses captured in ephemeral poses in aged-white ovals and connected to each other with chains of petals and ribbons. 

That is not the detail that so clearly makes it Roxy’s. 

Instead, it is the ornate gilt gold frame directly to Callie’s right that might actually be solid gold if the metallic taste on her bifurcated tongue is to say anything. Or, to be even more specific, it is the impasto painting contained. It depicts a wizard, and one not worthy of such an ostentatious casing by any stretch of the imagination. Despite the clearly visible brushstrokes, it appears . . . pixelated. Not in a stylistic way, but more as if an artist exponentially increased the size of a very small wizard gif they found on Google images, and then copied it painstakingly onto canvas.

(There is no way for Calliope to know this, but an artist had done exactly that for a paint by number outline, which Roxy received as a birthday present from one D Stri a number of years ago.)

“Oh my,” Callie says faintly, adjusting her grip on the trunk for lack of anything better to do with her hands.

"Ain't it beautiful?" Roxy gushes, a hand reaching out to touch it gently with obvious love. "I painted it myself! Rose got me the frame custom-made after her first album went platinum."

“Oh my,” Callie repeats, even fainter, because she’s not quite sure what she should do with that information. 

She’s equally unsure as to what to do when she manages to tear her attention away and towards the doorway at the end of the entry hall. In lieu of an actual door, as one might expect, is a waterfall of threaded beads. There’s a pattern, and it takes the form of a black kitten wearing a witch hat and long gray beard. 

"C'mon, let's get goin' on those pancakes. I promised THREE FULL MEALS per day for the winner of that contest, and I'm stickin' to my guns and makin' sure you get 'em," Roxy says, and brushes her way through the beads. 

Calliope is forced to fold her body in on itself to get through the doorway, but she’s accustomed to it. After her first significant growth spurt, she’d walked through more than one lintel accidentally. She was now, among other things, an expert in door and wall repair.

The door leads to a living room with a rather open floor plan that bleeds from plush black carpeting to the marble tile of the kitchen with only a half wall to separate them. Here is where Calliope begins to suspect that Roxy is not the sole decorator.

There is a chair that seems formed of a great black octopus, a couch carved into the body of a pitch rhino, a love chair cradled in the hindquarters of an obsidian leather frog—all lending to a very specific gothic imagery.

Or, they would, if they were not completely undermined by the statuettes of wizards, cat figurines, pink throws and pinker pillows, and the polka dot bow tie attached to the base of the ludicrously large television mounted on a purple and black fleur de lis wall.

The kitchen is slightly more sane, if you can call the medieval witch aesthetic entrapped in its almost-four walls sane. Stains suspiciously like blood spatter the floor in a pentagram, and on the outside wall is a stone fireplace with what appears to be a cast iron cauldron. Spices, dried meats, onions, and garlic hang from ties on the ceiling. Calliope can’t find any light source besides electric candles. 

Roxy stands at the slate grey island, having taken out ingredients and two large mixing bowls while Calliope was examining the room. She pours and pinches from two sets of jars, the corresponding ones appearing almost the same, but smelling very different.

“Why two bowls?” Callie asks from the other side of the island and trying to peer through the pots and pans that obscure her view. She doesn’t want to loom and make Roxy uncomfortable by standing behind her or to her side, as a human or troll might.

“Take a seat chica, you’re makin’ me hells of nervous just standin’ there,” Roxy teases gently, and Calliope flinches almost imperceptibly. She’d managed to fuck that simple goal up quicker than usual. 

Callie pulls out a lacquered black wooden chair from the breakfast nook over to where she’d been standing and sits down on it.

"Aaaaand 'cause troll girls like diff things than human girls like me and the lovebirds. IDK if you've had grubloaf, but I can't even stomach that shit when it's sliced and sizzled up as a side of fake bacon. Fakon? Anyways, if you've got any requests on the nutrition front, just lemme know and I'll try to work some magics and make it happen."

“Um, no,” Callie says. “I’m okay. I ate before I got here. I have a very . . . particular diet, so I brought my own meals.”

Calliope tries not to think about the cooler full of ice packs and raw meat she has in her trunk.

They sit and work respectively in a kind of comfortable silence—“kind of,” because Roxy is singing under her breath. Callie pulls out her phone, and puts on  _ Every Little Thing She Does is Magic _ to accompany Roxy’s off key rendition. Roxy loses her goddamn  _ mind  _ shrieking in excitement and gratitude, and they have to start it over. She sings along at the top of her lungs, and Callie does as well (although at a more sedate level).

The singing wakes the household, and the band members stumble in one by one, each looking more disorderly than the last.

Jade is first to appear, dark braided hair held on top of her head by a straining hair tie in a sloppy bun-ponytail. Whether she slept with it in, or her hair is just that desperate to fight its bounds is anyone’s guess. The black cascades down to her collarbone even with what must be half its length settled on her crown. She wears a yellow and green frog-covered pajama set that seems most appropriate for a child, if it wasn’t worn by a woman that easily hit six foot. Calliope has the sneaking suspicion that she had it custom made, because it is tailored to her muscular body in a way that would be hard to find off the rack.

“Good morning!” Jade says with a broad grin that is far more cheerful than the tired lines of her face should be as she settles down at the breakfast nook. Callie, out of polite reflex, moves her chair from the island to sit across from her. Before she can even get out a good morning, she’s interrupted by Roxy settling a tall glass of orange juice in front of Jade and whisking away just as quickly. The glass is already sweating from the heat, even though the air conditioning must be on full blast. Calliope recalls reading that old houses have worse insulation, and thinks not too much of it.

“I’m—” the dark skinned girl starts, but is cut off when Rose stumbles into the room with a low moan as she hits the half wall first.

She holds the same visage as an incredibly untidy corpse. Yes, her makeup is perfection even at six fifteen in the morning—eyes shaded in heavy purple with black wings and intense lashes that can  _ not _ be real. Her mouth is black as pitch, and her teeth are the perfect white of a skeleton picked clean by crows. 

On the other hand, her hair looks like a tumbleweed, short blonde bob sticking straight up in some places and tangled in nearly all the others. Rose shambles like she’s not quite sure how her body works, as if she’d spent the night dreaming she was a being with more legs and is now disconcerted by the placement of her limbs and muscles. She walks into everything in her path, trips over her own violet lace nightgown, and finally runs into the island placed in the center of the kitchen and several feet away from the breakfast nook until she makes her way to Jade’s lap. 

Jade’s expression as she watches her girlfriend is beyond fond, a softness in her eyes that makes Calliope ache with envy in places she didn’t know could ache. When Rose settles on her legs, she envelops the petite woman in her arms and presses a kiss to her nose. Rose groans louder than she did when she hit the island toes first, and wrinkles up her face like a disgruntled pug. 

“Good mor—” Calliope begins, but is cut short when Vriska announces her own presence insults first. She decides with an exasperated sigh that perhaps greetings can wait until they’re all in the same room. 

Vriska is clothed in a cerulean shirt decorated with a sleeping cartoon arachnid on it and the words “itsy bitsy spider”, matched with a pair of black shorts covered in embroidered spiderwebs. 

“Fuck you, Lalonde,” she starts off with, half shouting. Roxy simply winks and sets a plate of grubcakes on the table. 

With a quick succession of movements, she sets on the table a truncheon of grub gravy, a metal can of Canadian maple syrup, a huge stack of pancakes for Rose and Jade to share (no way could Jade alone eat that—oh God, Callie hasn’t seen anything inhale food that fast since the industrial vacuum was invented), Mountain Dew Pitch in front of Rose, and a diet Monster for Vriska. 

Callie just wishes they hadn’t chosen to use a stylized drawing of a cherub very obviously based on her brother for the diet Red flavor. It's hard enough seeing him in the mirror.

The only member of the band left is Damara, and by the time she appears even Roxy has sat down to eat. In front of the designated Damara seat is a large mug of black coffee that’s basically sludge with a quarter cup of sugar, and a plate with two small grubcakes. Introductions have already been made, and then Callie summarily ignored by everyone except Roxy.

Callie’s contribution—already meager—to the conversation is cut short with a gasp at Damara’s cross shuffle. 

The troll is wearing bunny slippers that seem to have been made with the heads of actual hares, a sheer red nightgown that stops mid thigh and hides nothing of the nude figure beneath, her coarse black hair slammed up on her head carelessly and held there by large clips, a fearsome scowl twisting her face. The world seems to have disappointed her immensely, and she is out to make it pay.

Starting with her grubcakes.

This is apparently normal, and no one pays notice to Damara’s practically naked and furious form.

Calliope, meanwhile, is feeling exponentially gayer than before Damara walked into the room. Roxy snorts at Callie’s poleaxed expression, pats her gently on the shoulder, and half stands so she can get close enough to whisper in Calliope’s ear:  _ yeah, me too gurl. _

It’s comforting that she’s not alone in this helpless attraction, but also embarrassing, so Callie focuses her eyes on her clasped hands as the lime green circles on her cheeks spread to encompass the rest of her face.

Breakfast ends soon after, everyone besides Jade and Roxy having consumed almost dangerous levels of caffeine. Rose went through three cans of Mountain Dew, Vriska through a second Monster, and Damara  _ three  _ more cups of her sludge. Callie watches the consumption with a sort of secondhand awe. Caffeine doesn’t do much for her unless she has an amount that even the Folger twins wouldn’t scoff at. (Eating a can of strong brew coffee grounds, or ten 5-hour ENERGIES are the easiest ways.) But she does know, from centuries of observing humans and trolls, that that is Quite A Lot.

Strangely enough, Vriska is the one to re-acknowledge her presence first. Callie wouldn’t have expected her, out of everyone else, but then she opens her mouth and it makes sense.

“You’re not going to use this footage in your nerdy documentary, are you?” she asks, trying to seem nonchalant, but her body is sliding down in her chair a silly amount to cover the childish decal on her shirt.

Callie glances down at the camera she’s been keeping by her as if it was necessary for her survival, having almost completely forgotten that it was there.

“Oh, well, I’m not su—”

“Because it’s rude, you know, we just woke up,” Vriska continues, sliding down a little more. Her butt is off the chair and she’s supporting herself with hands gripping the wood of her seat and her legs spread wide and solid.

“I probably won’t, but if—”

Vriska disappears completely under the table, tangled mane of hair popping up between Calliope’s legs. Calliope tips back and almost off her chair in surprise, and Vriska grabs the camera.

“How the fuck do I delete this?!” she asks, brandishing the camera threateningly and pressing random buttons and dials that mostly make it zoom or change focus. She activates the night vision and almost drops it in surprise at the suddenly blindingly bright screen.

Calliope gathers herself and gets out of her chair, plucking the camera from Vriska’s desperate grip with ease, careful not to pull too hard and break the (comparably) small troll. Vriska shrieks in response, kicks at Callie’s shins and pulls a hair tie out of her nest of hair with a pair of red dice dangling from the elastic. Callie eeps, having seen the damage that those dice could do in youtube videos and TMZ Entertainment News, and floats backwards and out of her reach. Apparently not expecting Calliope to have been able to fly out of range of the miniature dice, Vriska starts hopping with the greatest of dignity and screaming obscenities. Calliope scrunches herself horizontal to the tall ceiling so Vriska can’t grab her legs.

“Really, Vriska?” Rose cuts in, voice smooth and cultured and collected—everything that Vriska isn’t at the moment. A few (one) well placed jibes (jibe) later and Vriska is arguing with her. Roxy helps Callie escape through the back door at the far end of the kitchen and onto a wrap around porch. The planks strangely seem more solid than the ones on the front. Less use, perhaps?

“Thank you,” Callie says gratefully, and Roxy gives a cheerful wave.

"Gimme a sec here—I gotta go stop 'em from burnin' the house down," she says before disappearing back into the kitchen, and there's the sound of breaking dishwear, Rose humiliating Vriska with big words, and Vriska shouting  _ Fuck you L8londe! _ before the door shuts behind her.

Callie sits down on the porch steps, holds the camera in front of her, and shrugs expressively.

"Today has been . . . fascinating? Is that the word? I don't quite know the right word." she sits there in the silence for a while, turns the camera to face the yard and takes some shots of a deer that is hanging around by a bird bath held in a wizard's hands.

"Roxy is probably the best part so far," she says, quietly, but not so quietly that she knows the camera won't pick it up. "I don't know that I'd be having any fun at all without her.

"She's funny, and beau—" Callie starts but then:

"Puh-lease. Like she'd ever be into a green horror show alien like  _ you _ ," Vriska says from behind her, and Callie twists sharply to see her leaning in the doorway with a scornful expression. "Have you ever seen yourself?"

Callie sucks in a sharp breath, not sure how to respond to the insults when she knows that they're true—she's a fetish, not a lover to humans and trolls.

"Anyways, we're about to rehearse. If you want to film it, follow me I guess." Vriska whirls around, not bothering to hold the screen door, and it falls shut behind her with a  _ thwap  _ and then falls right back open.

Calliope takes a deep breath, ignores the hurt in her chest—because she can never quite get used to the fact that she's a horrifying beast—and follows Vriska inside.

They make their way to the basement, which looks like every stereotypical rehearsal space in a movie that Callie's ever seen. Papers strewn everywhere, a few book cases, tile floor that melds into carpeting, records thrown everywhere with no visible record player. When she picks up a Rocky Horror Picture Show album and looks inside, she's confronted with nude photos of Damara.

She drops it in surprise, and Damara winks at her from where she's settling in behind the keyboard with a cigarette hanging from her lips.

After a few more minutes of everyone getting ready and Damara lighting another cigarette (ignoring the ash that falls on her fingers like she can't even feel it), they start to play.

Callie has never seen them live, just on Youtube or Netflix, and it's . . . intense.

They are a group of very different people, people who shouldn't make sense together, but as a cohesive whole create something entrancing. Rose's voice cuts through her like an acidic sugar high, Damara's piano is haunting, Vriska's drums the heartbeat of something ancient and powerful, Jade's bass the steady thrum that holds it all together.

Her heart pumps with something that could be fear, or could be exhilaration. She thinks about the first time she tried to fly, teetering on the edge of the cliffs in Scotland, running from a mob that wanted to burn her alive. It wouldn't have worked, and she could easily have outfought them, but she didn't want to fight and she didn't want them to try decapitation next and force her hands. 

Standing there, air flowing against her, ocean crashing underneath, feet hesitant on the crumbling dirt as the sound of screams and lights grew closer.

She falls, and she is going to die for one endless second, but then she is carried away on the sound of the music and the tones of Rose's hypnotic voice.

Rose's hypnotic voice, which stops abruptly and is replaced with the feedback of a mic being banged against a 21 year old's metal headband and forehead.

"This isn't working," she announces, the rest of the band having screeched to a halt to cover their ears. Callie realizes her hands are shaking on the camera, can't steady them. Her entire body is thrumming, alive.

If she ever doubted Rose's claims that she had propelled them to fame via magic, she did not now. She knew the sound of witches playing when she heard them—rarer now, but in here, now released from the spell, Calliope knew.

"These lyrics are fucking—they're  _ wrong,"  _ Rose continues, and makes to slam her head against the mic again. Jade shoves her hand hurriedly between Rose and the mic so there is only the dull tap of flesh.

"Lalonde, they're in  _ Latin,  _ no one gives a shit what they're saying," Vriska says somewhat reasonably, crossing her arms and tapping her foot impatiently.

"I care!" Rose snaps. "They have to be  _ just  _ right, don't you see that?!"

Callie gets a shiver down her spine at those words, an ominous intuition. Damara is sighing and putting out her cigarette on her own skin before dropping it in an empty paint can at her feet.  Vriska just groans and drops her head to rest on her drum set.

Jade takes one of her girlfriend's fists in her loose, capable hands, rubs the tension out of it and murmurs words too quiet to be heard by humans or trolls. Calliope graciously tunes them out, focusing on zooming in on the slowly relaxing fingers, and then on the way Rose's face and figure slump with surrender to being comforted.

"Why don't we all just take a break?" Jade asks, as if it's really a question. "Rose, we can work on the lyrics together, just you and me."

 

"Get a fucking pile," Vriska mutters, her face flushed a little, and Callie realizes abruptly how borderline pornographic this must be to trolls. Damara cocks an eyebrow, says something in Japanese that's wildly inappropriate and has Callie giggling and balancing the camera in one hand so she can cover the monstrosity that is her open mouth.

Rose sighs and shakes her head, crossing the room to one of the book cases and pulling down a series of books. The first is thick, bound in leather a color that makes Callie uncomfortable, then a slimmer and modern dictionary, then an even slimmer thesaurus. She stares at them like she can see right through the covers and was flipping through the pages.

"Alright," she says, shuffling the books so the leather one is on top, frowning at it. "Let's practice Second Hand Damnation, I can rework this later."

Calliope isn't sure that she's recovered enough from the first half a song to listen to another one, but Rose is taking back her stand behind the microphone and setting the books neatly at her high heeled feet, so she supposes she doesn't have much of a choice.

To her relief (disappointment?) the music isn't as mind melting as the last song. It doesn't make her want to fly, but it does make her want to dance, and she finds it difficult not to sway and to focus on getting good shots. She doesn't really care about the shots, but she somehow knows that Vriska would laugh at her if she was to dance.

It comes to a natural end a few hours later, that end being Vriska refusing to play and then lobbing her drumsticks at the back of Rose's head until Rose was snarling at her and reaching for something in her pocket and Roxy appeared out of nowhere to announce that lunch was ready.

Lunch is a series of awkward moments where everyone at the table tries to inhale their food and Callie wishes for the cooler of steaks in her room. She excuses herself early to go do so, and Roxy gives her arm an understanding pat. She doesn't push for her to eat with everyone else, so she must have done a cursory Google search.

Calliope isn't sure if the thoughtfulness makes her happy, or if it Roxy's new knowledge makes her queasy.

_ Monstrous,  _ indeed. What else would you call sitting on a bathmat in a guest room, naked so that you don't get blood on your clothes, eating raw meat with your hands?

After lunch, all the band members seem to have dispersed to do their own thing, and Roxy left a note on Callie's door that said she was going grocery shopping. That leaves her with nothing to do and an esoteric (to say the least) house to do it in. She's worn out from rehearsal anyways, and Roxy states specifically to  _ “make yourself at home!”  _ so she heads down to the living room.

Her first instinct is to watch TV, but she can't find a remote and the buttons on the side of the TV are just this side of too delicate for her to feel comfortable trying to touch. That mistake was one that she'd made before.

Instead she heads for one of the bookshelves, perusing it lazily, and realizing after a few seconds that it's filled entirely with occultist books: some fictional, some new and with the Borders Bookstore tag still on, some that were stolen from libraries, and some old enough to set her teeth on edge. None of them are on your garden variety Satanism, ranging from New Age silliness to ones with titles more like  _ A Zoologist's Guide to Demons and Old Gods _ .

She picks a few at random, and is surprised when she sits on the couch and the one that she's holding isn't as new as she would have expected. The binding and the covers certainly are, but the pages inside are yellowing with age and laminated for protection. The obvious care put into it is strangely charming.

The contents are not, by any stretch of the imagination, as cute as the restoration.

It's explicit directions for human sacrifice, and by the taste of the energy inside the covers she can tell that this has been around some serious magic. There isn't such a thing as dark magic, not really, since magic is just the allocation of energy channeled into breaking the “laws” of science. The allocation of said energy though? It leaves behind a trace in what's around it at the time.

And this trace is a blood trail.

She closes the book, and sets it carefully on the coffee table because she doesn't want to be touching it anymore, not even to put it away.

The next one is much better—focused on glossy pages and cartoon drawings of deities and scientifically improbable creatures. There's a shiny cut out coupon in the back promising 20% off the sequel if you mail it in  _ right away! _

The expiration date is in the 90's.

She puts it down, feeling much better about life, and looks at the next one. From her cursory glance of the outside cover she recognizes it immediately: a novel about sexism on the sister planets of Alternia and Beforus. Her best friend's ancestor had given this exact text to Kanaya. On the inside cover is an inscription written in green ink that makes it clear the novel was gifted to Damara, surrounded by first a heart and then a diamond. Calliope finds this odd, especially the way it's a jade blood's color, but shrugs it off. It would be too much of a coincidence if Porrim had given the novel to Damara—right?

It reminds her to call Kanaya, since she hasn't spoken with her friend in several days. They'd both been busy with finals first and then with packing. Kanaya, to move out of her dorm; Calliope, to go on this trip.

She heads up to her room, forgetting the camera on the couch and so just deciding instead to just record her screen. The urge to record every piece of her life has always been strong. First, to keep track of what she had done and what her brother was responsible for, and second, to keep records of her friends when they inevitably passed on. Keeping company with trolls had helped her gain a little bit of time to spend with them, but even a fuschia blood would not be able to match her lifespan.

She tries not to think on it too much.

Kanaya picks up on the second ring, looking a little frazzled (unusual) and talking into her phone screen rather than into her webcam ( _ very _ unusual for the time of night).

"Are you alright?" Calliope asks, frowning in concern.

"Quite. I apologize for my appearance, I just have been very busy." She sits down with a sigh, and tilts her phone so it's a better angle of her elegant bone structure as she lays down on her bed. Something is off about her face that Callie can't quite put her finger on. "How has your trip been? You left today, correct?"

"Yes!" Callie says, and out pours a torrent of words recounting her first day. She talks about Roxy more than is quite appropriate considering the length of their acquaintance, and even to her own ears she's obviously enamored.

Then she realizes Kanaya's eyes have drifted shut and she is snoring softly, the next moment the phone falling onto the pillow beside her. It's still tilted towards her face, however.

_ Unusual  _ no longer seems like the best qualifying word for this encounter. Worrying, perhaps.

She realizes what was wrong with Kanaya's face. There's no makeup.

Or rather, there is makeup, but it was clearly done with a shaking hand. Her normally impeccable winged eyeliner is sloppy, and her green lipstick has smudged onto her teeth where her mouth is open in sleep. Even her hair is slightly frizzy.

"Oh dear," Calliope says softly. Her friend must have been working herself to the bone, to look so unkempt.

She hangs up, since she knows that the last thing Kanaya would want is to be seen this way. Callie decides to herself that she's going to call again as soon as possible, and spends a few moments trying to compose a fitting message to let Kanaya know that she'd ended the call prematurely. Or rather, Kanaya's sleeping had ended the call prematurely.

Before she can decide, something bangs against her door and she jumps with a start. Vriska's voice shouts, "Dinner!" and then there's the sound of feet stomping down the stairs.

Well, then.

She realizes she's starving halfway through dinner, and the band works through the food with a type of ferocity usually reserved for large predators ripping into a chunk of meat. It reminds her of herself, a large predator, wanting to rip into a chunk of meat. Thankfully, it's over quickly, the multiple people so close together making an oppressive air of body heat on top of the already uncomfortably warm weather. It's an old house, and even with the AC at full blast the air is still syrupy thick.

After dinner, Callie hurries up to her room once again, and the camera is left abandoned and still running on the sofa for the night.

 

—

 

Someone wearing a black miniskirt with bare pale legs sits down in front of the camera, settling in with a squeak from the couch's leather against that of her skirt. A delicately manicured hand rests on the side of the dark leather cushion. The news is switched on, and the sound of a FOX news anchor fills the room.

"Along with today's nationwide record heatwaves, there's been record breaking increase in violent crimes," she says, voice grim for once in her obnoxiously cheerful life.

She goes on to describe, in increasingly somber tones, the several mass shootings that had taken place. It takes a full fifteen minutes, without going into detail. Everything is blamed from violent video games to the liberal media. Her male co-anchor seems too affected to even speak properly, every once in awhile the slip of a stutter to his words that only worsens as the minutes stretch on.

The news clicks off with that abrupt silence that always follows the moment after turning off a TV and the person sitting in front of the camera sighs, purple painted nails tapping lightly on the couch.

"All on schedule, then," she says, and rises with a sigh, moving out of the camera's view.

The lights switch off, leaving nothing but a blinking red light indicating that it's recording.


	2. Tuesday Tanglebuddies

"Today," Callie says with a forced energeticness to her words, "we're going to be doing what everyone's done before, hopefully with a different angle."

She's on the porch again, with her legs crossed and the camera balanced on top of the railing to face her. From inside she can vaguely hear Roxy singing, although she can’t quite make out the words or the tune.

"That is, we're going to talk to the band about how Rose and Jade's relationship has affected them, and then maybe follow Rose and Jade around a little if they'll let me." she stares off into the middle distance, eyes a little glazed before she snaps herself out of it. "It's strange outside, isn't it? Something just feels—"

Roxy appears in the frame behind her, making a silly face into the camera when she sees that it's recording.

"Time for breakfast, Callie!" she says with a grin and a tap on Calliope's shoulder.

"Oh!" Callie says, and they head inside for yet another meal with the band. This time she switches off the camera to avoid Vriska drama, although if she'd had it on it would have been almost a word for word replay of the last morning.

 

-

 

"So, Vriska, what do you think about Rose and Jade?" Callie asks, hoping against improbable odds that Vriska won't be annoyed that she's being interrupted when watching TV to be asked a question she'd been asked a thousand times before.

 _"That's_ your idea of original material?" she says with an eye roll, placing her arms over the top of the couch and spreading her legs to take up as much room as possible. She must be trying to crowd Callie out, because when Callie doesn't move she retreats into herself with a sigh.

After a moment, it becomes clear that she isn't going to add anything to that.

"And about your pitch leanings toward Rose?" Calliope prompts.

Vriska sputters, bolting upwards and standing with an indignant expression. "I have no such—where would you even get the _impression—"_

Callie shrugs, and tries not to laugh. "Well, you're constantly insulting her, and sometimes when you talk to her you smell rather like—"

"DO I GO AROUND SNIFFING YOU WHEN YOU'RE HAVING A PERFECTLY PLATONIC AND AMIABLE DISCUSSION?" Vriska yells, picking up a decorative stone Ch'thulu and pitching it at Callie's head.

It makes impact with a thud that probably would have killed a human, given a troll a concussion, but merely makes Callie say flatly, "Ow."

Vriska screams, throws an entire lamp at Calliope that she catches with ease, and then storms out of the room.

 

—

 

"Hey," Callie says with a smile as she walks towards Roxy. She's sitting at a table, short hair clipped back from her face, seeming to be taking a break from cleaning by reading _The Magician_. "How's your book?"

Roxy groans, rolling her eyes and setting it down. "Quentin's a fuckboy. Nothing new. What's crack-a-lacking?"

Callie's smile, which had begun to fade, stretches back out. Her closed lips almost open to show her fangs. "I'm just asking all of you a question you've heard a million times before."

"Is it about Rose and Jade?" Roxy guessed with a grin of her own.

"Got it in one," Callie admitted, sitting down across from her.

"Well, go ahead."

"So what are your feelings about Rose and Jade's relationship?" Callie asks, all business voice for the sake of her documentary which was becoming less official and more ridiculous every single day she spent with them.

"I'm so happy that my li’l sis is happy," Roxy says with a wide smile. She props up her head in her hands and sighs happily. "It’s just a gift to see her smile. Like, no one but Jade's ever made her."

"i bet," Callie says quietly, thinking of a friend that she'd had once, a girl with short dark hair, who had smiled like no one else with her ridiculous boy.

"We didn't have the most . . . emotionally nourishing upbringing. So it's a relief to see that after all these years of a huge front of disinterest and hate she's finally found someone who got past that to bring out the love inside of her." Roxy strokes the cover of her book with a finger absently. Callie watches it with undue fascination. "I was almost about to give up on her when they met, you know. Rose thinks that she was subtle falling in love, but she was anything but. Their band just wasn't cutting it until they found Jade, and Rose fell in love with her ears first.

"Uh, that is, she fell in love with the sound of her first. Not she fell in love with Jade's ears first. I mean, have you seen that girls jungle of hair? She wouldn't even be able to _find_ her ears much less fall in love with them on first meeting."

Callie enjoys the rambling, accidentally cutting it off with a giggle that she reflexively covers her mouth to make.

"You really shouldn't cover your smile, you know," Roxy says, face softening. "It's beautiful."

Before Callie can answer, or undo her massive tangled expression of blushing, Damara is blowing smoke in her face.

She has appeared out of literally nowhere, just suddenly appearing in a small twist of time and space on the table before Callie: her legs spread to hang off the edge and flash black boyshorts under her red school girl shirt, her cigarette hanging elegantly in one hand before she takes another drag. Callie fixes the positioning of the camera when she realizes it’s pointing directly into Damara's cleavage, blushing again, and for a different reason. She's never quite been able to get over immodesty in this era, used to old sexist human conventions. The beginning of the miniskirt had nearly given her a heart attack.

She isn't saying that girls couldn't wear anything they wanted: she is simply saying that she hopes one day it will stop giving her a coronary to see them express their freedoms.

 _[I am bored. You will interview me next,]_ Damara says in East Beforan, a language that Callie only knows the basics of. She'd begun studying it only a year or two ago, and as a hobby. She can sort of catch the drift of Damara's meaning if she focuses on the meanings she can suss out of her emotional patterns and body language.

"Well—okay?" she says, phrasing it like a question, unable to see Roxy past Damara's torso. Roxy shoots her arm out to the side with a thumbs up, and Callie sighs in relief, even if she would have really liked to continue their conversation. "So . . . how do you feel about Rose and Jade being together?"

_[They have good sex. Loud sex.]_

Callie frowns. She doesn't know the word. Damara gestures crudely and she understands.

“Ahh. Oh my. Well. Any . . . personal opinions? I guess?" she says, hoping for something more than a commentary on their sex life. That’s the only thing Damara’s commented on, really, in interviews in the past between cryptic occultist statements.

 _[They're predictable. I can always tell what they're going to do. It's boring.]_ She pauses, takes another drag. _[For instance, Rose always fucks Jade's cunt right now on Tuesdays. She's going to scream in one, two—]_

Damara pauses, and a scream cuts through the house. Roxy laughs, and Calliope refuses to cradle her head in her hands. This interview is not going as she'd hoped.

 _[See what I mean?]_ Damara says smugly. She puts the cigarette out on Calliope’s shoulder and then is gone, just like that.

Callie frowns at the cigarette ash on her shoulder, and sets down her camera so she can brush the ash off into her hand and head towards the trash can. It didn't hurt her, of course: she was designed to stay near _suns_ but—it was rather rude.

Not to mention that she couldn't understand half the words she said. The verbs in particular.

"Um," she says, looking questioningly at Roxy, who’s giggling and trying to hide it behind her book unsuccessfully.

"Filth," she says with a shake of her head. "Pure filth, Callie child."

Anyone calling Callie child was ridiculous, but it had been so long since anyone had that Callie's heart warmed a little.


	3. Wednesday Witches

Calliope sits on her bed, starting up her camera with an impatient hum. Outside, the world shimmers—not from rain or morning dew, but from heat. It’s over a hundred, and going out is Not Advised. In fact, the radio anchors, when not talking about what they were vaguely calling “summer madness” (was it a new band? It seemed to be getting bad reviews if you asked Callie), were giving tips on how to stay safe.

"What we're going to be examining today," she says when it finally switches on completely and is set to be recording, "is the band’s spiritual life. This hasn't really been done in any kind of depth—they're usually just written off as Satanists due to their occultist vibes and the frankly disturbing things that they say. But I didn't really get that vibe from Jade or from Roxy, so we'll see!"

Callie prepares to tramp through the house, determining that whoever she runs into first will be the first person she interviews. This works out rather quickly in her opinion, nearly suspiciously quickly, as when she opens her door Damara is stand in the hallway and staring at her with her rust red eyes and a grin.

"Oh, hello!" Callie says, trying not to jump in surprise. How had she not heard or sensed her approach? She must have just been too into her own head—that, or Damara had pulled a teleportation trick again. " . . . Would you mind an interview?"

Damara shrugs and smiles, that knowing impatient thing that says she's already planned an answer for Calliope’s question and that she's just been waiting for the chance to say it while the cherub lazed about.

"What are your religious beliefs? I know that you mention magic sometimes . . . are you a witch?" she asks.

Damara shakes her head, pulls out an orange prescription bottle with the label pulled off out of her cleavage. Callie watches her do it and feels bad almost immediately when she realizes that she was just staring at her boobs.

"My magic," she says in heavily accented English, opening the bottle and pouring a few red demon-emoji shaped pills into her hand. Callie doesn't know modern drugs well enough to know whether it's ecstasy or acid. "Does not come from inside." She taps her heart.

"It comes from here." She pops the pills into her mouth, blows Callie a kiss, and in a flash that Callie can’t see but can smell, is gone.

It smells, unsurprisingly, like weed and cherries.

Callie sighs, figuring that she can't have gone far and that not really being enough to go on. She searches the house for Damara: closets, the roof, everything, and finally gives up and heads to the porch. The porch is her friend. The porch never disappears in the middle of questions. The porch is always right there when she needs it.

The porch is occupied by two women making out like they're going to die if they aren't attached at the lips.

"Damara?" Callie calls hesitantly, not sure if she really wants to get that interview bad enough anymore and pretty sure that she doesn't. Her body is uncomfortably tight inside her skin.

Damara flips her off, cigarette that had been clutched in her fingers falling to the porch but not before bouncing off her partner. She really should be more careful, it's got to be a fire hazard especially tod—

"Oh my," Callie says faintly, already backing away and into the house, heart beating triple time.

The woman on bottom has ceased kissing Damara, her head spinning 180 degrees in a way that wasn't troll-ly possible, ichor black eyes dizzying to look into. She hisses, and her tongue isn't the solid black it should have been: it’s rust red and a serpentine thing, forked in sections that move independently of one another. For some reason, it's that fact that makes Callie turn and run.

She runs directly into and almost over Roxy, her sheer bulk knocking the other woman several feet back and into the wall with a soft  _ thud. _ Callie slams the kitchen door because first things first, but then she's placing the camera on the ground and fussing over Roxy, heart scared and adrenaline pumping still.

"You're fine, you're fine," Roxy says, waving her off although she gives an involuntary wince when she does so. "Ooh, think I might have messed up my shoulder."

"Let me look at it," Callie says. "I'm a doctor."

Which is a strange thing to say after all this time—although she had stayed current on her medical training even after she no longer served as a medic in war zones, she hasn't had the need to actually treat anything in a very long time.

Much less something that she'd  _ caused. _

She tries not to focus on that thought, instead fetches an ice pack from the freezer; she wraps it in a hand towel because most likely whatever's wrong, it won't hurt to put ice on it. Roxy slips out of her t-shirt like it’s no big deal—the being half naked bit, not the bit where she has to actually make the motions and is groaning softly under her breath even when Callie helps her.

Callie does her best to be a lady and not look at Roxy's boobs, instead staring at her shoulder with laser focus. There's nothing terribly wrong, it's still in the socket—

"The muscle's probably going to be a little sore, and there's going to be some bruising," Callie says apologetically. "I really am sor—"

"No, I know that look," Roxy says with a pained smile. "Was it Damara or Rose?"

Callie feels her mouth drop open in surprise a bit before curving into a reluctant smile. "Damara," she admits.

Roxy laughs, shakes her head, stands with one arm hanging loosely and awkwardly and the other swinging at a more natural angle.

"I'll make you some tea. We could both use it," she says, and heads for the stove. She pulls down a porcelain teapot with Voldemort's face on it.

Most notably, Voldemorts face smushed up against Dumbledore’s as he licks his way into the bearded man’s mouth.

"Thank you," Callie says gratefully, feeling luckier than she absolutely should after what she'd done. It had been so long since she'd hurt someone, even on accident, that her body was shaky with guilt and adrenaline.

"It's no problem," Roxy says, finishing putting water in the pot and setting it on the stove. "So what's your question of the day that made Damara freak you out?"

"Oh, it's, well, it's a little personal." Calliope blushes, looks at her hands, hates the filed down yellow nails that resemble claws more than actual fingernails and the thick veins that bulge against her skin, and looks back up. "What do you believe in?"

Roxy crinkles up her face. "What do you mean?"

"Um, religion wise, that is."

"Oh!" Roxy's face fills with understanding and then crinkles back up as she leans against the counter, tapping a finger to her mouth as she thinks. "I don't really know. I've never really . . . thought about it that much.

"I grew up a Christmas Catholic, you know, only going to church on the holidays with Rosie and our moms." Something in Roxy softens at the memory, melts like butter. "She really liked communion. Or, as she called it, cannibalism."

Calliope laughs, a sound surprised out of her that splits her lips open to reveal the monstrously wide jaw that is concealed when it's closed, the rows of sharp teeth. She clamps down on it almost immediately, ashamed and fearful, but Roxy just grins.

"You have a gorgeous smile, you know," she says, and Callie's mouth parts just a little bit in shock because she didn't even  _ flinch _ , but the pot is already whistling and Roxy is turning to shut it off.

The smell of nutmeg and cloves fills the air as she pours the brown tea into two delicate china cups adorned with small pink human genitals. Callie accepts it gratefully, presses it to her lips, takes a small sip that drains a quarter of it even though they're fairly large.

"Oh my goodness," she says, setting it down. It's warm and sweet in her mouth, even though Roxy hadn't added any sugar.  _ Just like she would be,  _ she thinks, and is appalled at herself because she doesn't know if that was about eating Roxy or “eating” Roxy.

Either one is distracting and not what she's here for.

"So you don't believe in anything?" Calliope asks, desperately clinging to her composure in the face of her own thoughts. "Not even science?"

Roxy laughs, toys with her cup. Her skin is a gorgeous contrast against the light cream of the china. "Oh, well, science isn't something you believe in. It's just something that is, you know? I guess I'm just... waiting for someone or something to come along that's worth believing in."

There's a silence then, prolonged but not quite awkward, where they have prolonged eye contact. Roxy has a coy smile on her face, and Callie thinks about how some worship her, and about how she's never quite been comfortable with it, but with Roxy looking at her like she's worth something she thinks . . .

She thinks her heart is melting down to her toes.

 

—

 

When she finally leaves her tea party with Roxy, Callie decides to go see Jade, remembering with a grimace Roxy asking whether it had been Damara or  _ Rose.  _ She doesn't want to know what kind of magic Rose does, at least not yet. She could wait a lifetime and probably not want to know it—she has the sneaking suspicion that the leather bound book was Rose's.

She runs into Jade, although this time not literally, thank Christ. "Oh, hello!"

"Hi!" says Jade, balancing a stack of books that she keeps from tipping mostly by tucking her chin on top of them. "Would you mind movi—"

"Oh, of course," Calliope says and steps to the side so Jade can get at the living room bookcase. Jade ignores it, and kicks at the paneling of the wall opposite until the wall suddenly gives out under her foot and spins sideways.

"Um," Calliope says, almost dropping her camera in surprise.

"Yeah, surprised me too the first time I saw it!" Jade says cheerfully, heading down the stone staircase. It appears to have been carved from one block, and Calliope can see the chisel marks in the rock.

She follows Jade, almost chokes on the taste of magic as she steps into the enclosed space. It's overpowering, and tastes faintly of lavender.

The staircase isn't long, although it seemed endless from the top, and Calliope discovers that it was actually a Glade air freshener she was smelling and not actual lavender.

(She can still taste the magic, however.)

Callie looks around the room, wide eyed, the camera panning to follow her gaze. It's obviously a witch's cavern, although there are bits that scream mad scientist as well. An entire wall is floor to ceiling packed with shelves filled with jars of pickled, mutated cats.

"Ah, our little muties," Jade says fondly when she notices where Callie is staring. "Roxy's, actually. That's my corner."

Jade points past the corner of the room designated to chemicals that Calliope recognizes as the ones necessary for crystal meth, and towards a section where plants are growing under sun lamps.

"Why don't you just grow them outside?" Callie asks, a little shaken by everything but determined to continue on.

"Oh, I do grow plants outside. I just can't stand how quiet it is down here, without them talking." Jade reaches out a hand to pet the leaves of a tulip delicately, and it splits open down the middle, rears back, and laps at her fingers with a human tongue.

"Holy fuck," Callie breathes. She tries to gather herself, fails, takes a breath so deep she actually gets a little dizzy through the flat slits of her nose, and then says, "You're a witch, then?"

"Oh," Jade says, pausing, like she hadn't really thought about it. "I like the word gardener better, I think!"

"Okay." Callie stares off into the mid-distance for a bit, not really sure what to say before she forces herself to focus. "And you believe in . . . this is a delicate question, but you see for my documentary—"

Jade waggles her finger under Calliope's nose, there in front of her lightning fast. "Shush. It's time for Bec's walk."

She heads for the staircase, bounding up it in a way that Callie never could with how she has to hunch over to keep from hitting the ceilings. Callie is both relieved that she didn't bring something from the lab/coven room with them, and worried at what else she was going to bring out that wasn't already visible.

Not that she'd really looked around. And she has absolutely no intention to. She had only been invited by one person who used this room, and she doesn't want to make any of the other possible participants angry.

Without an ounce of regret, she heads upstairs to be confronted with Jade bouncing on her heels excitedly and rubbing at the white gold locket on her neck.

"Come on!" she says, making no motion to grab anything to walk as she heads outside, not even a pair of shoes. Calliope doesn't bother to put hers on either, just follows.

The moment they step outdoors, Calliope sees the heat hit Jade with an almost physical force. She sways back at the feeling, presses a hand to her chest with a quiet,  _ shit.  _ She shakes it off quickly enough though, and they're heading out towards the open drought brown grass of the lawn. The neighborhood is silent, people driven inside by the heat Callie assumes. Calliope was made to withstand the temperature of suns and black holes, and this is no discomfort to her.

Jade takes her necklace off, says, "Who's a good boy?" three times not with the air of an excited pet owner but more with that of someone enacting a ritual. On the last repetition, she heaves her arm back and throws it with a shout of "FETCH!" with the locket snapping open like the clasp broke from some force within.

A dog the color of the white gold heart forces itself out through the locket, popping out in impossible segments and portions. Callie's eyes are wide, but this is honestly the least strange thing she's seen today, and she takes it in stride. The dog snatches the locket out of the air when he hits the ground and the necklace continues sailing by.

He turns, tail wagging, bounds up to Jade with the chain caught in his mouth.

"Awww," Jade says, kneeling down to let the grass tickle her knees and pressing a kiss between the dog's eyes. "Good dog, Bec!"

She fits the chain over his head and lets it dangle there, locket closed again now that its charge has been released.

"Go get me a stick!" she says, and grins at Calliope as her dog flashes out of existence and then back with a slight  _ pop  _ sound and the taste of fresh lettuce in Callie's mouth. Jade's arm goes back behind her head, and she throws the stick, straight into a pulsing black portal that appears from nowhere and disappears just as quick. Bec sniffs at the air with a kind of dogged determination and then disappears himself.

"That should keep him busy a while," she says with an air of satisfaction and turns to face Calliope fully. "Now, as for that question you were going to ask me.

"I don't know that I believe in a God, or a Goddess, per se." She frowns. "I've had all this time to piece an answer together, and it's still hard to say! Well . . . I think that the earth is a living thing, and that we need to take care of her."

Jade pats the ground lovingly, and Calliope's camera zooms in on the way the grass presses back into her touch, turns a little greener under her palm and fingers.

"She takes care of me, and you, and everyone here everyday in so many ways, and we just hurt her in return." Jade sniffs a little, looking deeply affected by her own words. Callie aches with empathy, thinking of the pulsing energy just under the surface of the planet that she can feel intimately, that she has felt ever since she predominated. "What goes around comes around, you know? And we've got a big fat bad thing coming as a collective whole, I just know it."

"That's why I'm here," Calliope says gently, with what she hopes is a reassuring face. She's practiced it in the mirror, but it always looks too alien to her, too monstrous, the same way her face always looks. "I chose this planet to protect, you know."

Jade laughs, something soft and sad. "I don't know that we can ever be saved from ourselves, Calliope, but I hope so."

Bec appears before Callie can get in a proper answer, and before long she's setting down her camera and playing fetch and tug of war with Bec. It turns out that as strong as Jade is—and she's built like a brick shithouse, make no mistake—she isn't strong enough for her dog.

Callie is, and it's a truly epic fight that ends with the toy broken and Bec tackling her to lick her face.

They head inside not too long after that, Jade calling Bec over to her and putting the necklace around her own neck before repeating the chant and Bec going back inside of his lil spelled enclosure.

"Are you alright?" Callie exclaims when Jade stumbles and falls just inside the doorway.

Jade doesn't answer, just waves a hand in a floppy motion from where she's on her knees. It's not very reassuring.

"You shouldn't have gone out," Rose says, voice gentle and worried from beyond the beaded wizard curtain. She breaks through it with a clacking of beads bumping into each other and cascading back into place, and kneels down beside Jade with a bottle of Gatorade in her hands.

Jade can't see Rose's face, as she's too busy panting and staring at the floor, but Calliope can and there's something . . . off. A sort of resigned acceptance, but not in the way that you'd expect from her girlfriend going outside to play with a ghost dog during a heat wave. It seems too serious for that.

"Here, drink this," Rose says, placing the bottle in Jade's hands after twisting the cap off. Jade downs the red liquid like it's life itself, which Calliope supposes it is for her. Callie doesn't need to drink much liquid to survive, so she wouldn't know.

"I'm sorry," Callie says, fingers tensing where they're playing with the hem of her dark green tank top. "I didn't know that it was so hot outside. I have trouble gauging temperatures."

 

"She'll be okay," Rose says with a fond smile, and Jade raises a thumb reassuringly. "Why don't you go get some lunch? I'll get Jade settled in with some fluids and salt, and then we can talk."

Calliope nods since that sounds like an okay deal to her, and heads upstairs to eat a steak naked, as God intended.

 

—

 

"I believe in the horrorterrors, and the power of magic and blood oaths." Rose plays with the sketch on the pad in front of her, tweaking just that littlest bit. She had explained that she kept lyrics in the form of an ancient language her friend Aradia had unearthed during her excavations. To Callie it looks an awful lot like a fursona, but she can't know everything.

"What are Horrorterrors?" Calliope asks, already feeling like she's going to regret this.

She does, but not for the reason she thinks. Most of the regret comes from listening to what she assumes is an extended trolling session during which Rose rebrands Lovecraft's elder gods to have (somehow) even  _ more  _ tentacles, at least three gay and polyamorous love affairs, an extensive rant on alien deity's genders, and finally her asking what Callie thought of her furs—song.

"It's very nice," Calliope says, inspecting the unicorn with violet eyes and tentacles for mane and tail. "The coloring is very lifelike. Er. On key?"

Rose nods, and Calliope can't tell what the twinkle in her eye is supposed to mean, but she suspects this has been an extended joke to Rose and she isn't too fond of that being confirmed so she brushes it off.

"Did you really sell the band's souls?" Callie asks, expecting more of the same dry wit and sly smile she'd been subjected to for the past twenty minutes.

But that doesn't happen.

The smile slips off of Rose's face, and she becomes grim. Without so much as an expression, she has aged ten, twenty years, the elegant lines to her face becoming hollow and gaunt instead of slim and contrasting.

She doesn't speak, merely gives a short, sharp nod, and then stands and leaves the room. Something about the way she walks is weird, Calliope notes, but her long skirt covers her feet and she's slightly unnerved so—much like she has done several times this week—she just lets it go.

 

—

 

Vriska blazes back into the house exactly on time for dinner, because even if she's a bad girl who's all that you still don't skip meals when Roxy Lalonde is around. Her grey legs are technicolor with chalk dust, and her braids are sloppy, like someone had done them in the dark.

Calliope has never seen her look happier.

_ [Someone got papped and pailed,] _ Damara says smugly, and Calliope doesn't understand her, but she can appreciate the sentiment (crude) when Vriska's lips go thin and her face flushes cerulean.

She doesn't say anything though, just shovels her nearly raw hamburger from her plate into her face, and narrows her eyes to glare at it.

"What kind of magic do you do?" Calliope asks, thinking a change of topic is in order and being grateful that she can talk to Vriska about this in public. Or, semi-public. Where Roxy is. Roxy probably won't allow Vriska to hurt her.

Vriska scoffs, setting down her fork to cross her arms. "Magic isn't real, you dumb shit."

"Vriska," Roxy says reprovingly, and Vriska just shrugs unrepentantly.

"Well, it isn't."

Rose shakes her head, and says, "How could I do  _ this  _ then?"

An obviously fake bouquet springs into her hand, and just as Vriska is about to reply with something no doubt scathing, the posey in the middle sprays a stream of purple ink into her mouth.

"I'm going to kill you, Lalonde!" Vriska growls, violet dripping from her teeth and staining her lips and chin. She knocks her chair backwards standing up, and throws herself bodily over the table to get at Rose.

Callie sighs, considers separating the wrestling pair, but decides against it and takes a sip of the tea Roxy so thoughtfully provided just then, in the same china set as earlier.

It's hot.


	4. Thursday Thirst

Calliope doesn't sleep well that night, although she does so deeply. She awakes clutching her sheets to her chest like a teddy bear, heart racing for a reason that she can't remember. A creeping feeling that someone is watching her goes down her spine, but when she flips over with teeth bared and jaw split, she sees nothing but the fleur de lis wallpaper and her own hideous reflection in the antique mirror on the vanity.

"Okay," she says quietly to herself, takes a deep breath, and sits up with a body that aches like someone has beaten it.

When she heads downstairs after cleaning up from a sticky breakfast she's greeted by the band and Roxy spread over the kitchen floor, occasionally rolling over on the tile to press themselves against a new cooler area.

"Is the air conditioning broken?" Calliope asks, concerned. They seemed to be sweating a disgusting and frankly worrying amount. When they move the tile is smeared with puddles, rust, cerulean, or clear depending on the woman. Vriska has her head shoved in the freezer and the rest of her body pressed against the open refrigerator in what appears to be an incredibly uncomfortable position.

"No," Roxy moans. A timer rings on the stove, beeping loudly, and she drags herself to her feet to turn it off. "Your time's up, Vris, it's Rose's."

Vriska groans, but for once seems too tired to fight. She doesn't even step away, just lets herself crumple to the ground in front of the fridge, presumably until it's her turn again. Another timer rings, this time a bobblehead wizard that stomps its staff with a bell attached from the island.

"Hydration break," Roxy announces, and her words are slurred together from heat exhaustion. She steps over Vriska to grab gatorade from the freezer and pass it out. The other women don't drink immediately, roll the cold bottles over their skin and leave moisture trails behind.

"Goodness," Calliope says. "How long have you been doing this?"

"I woke up at 2:30 in the morning," Jade says, voice muffled by the bottle pressed against her lips—not to drink or anything as normal as that, but to cool.

_ [I've been up since noon yesterday,] _ Damara hisses.

Callie tries to think of what people usually do when they're overheating when every summer movie she's ever seen clicks in her brain. "Should we go to a pool?"

Roxy's eyes widen from where she was chugging her Pink Lemonade, and she pulls away with a sucking pop of her lips to say, "That's a great idea."

"It's too hot to be outside though," Vriska complains, and Calliope is relieved. She was starting to wonder if Vriska had passed out.

"We can go to an indoor one," Roxy says. She seems renewed now that she has a goal, finishes off the half a bottle and burps when she's done. "Everyone, put on your swimsuits!"

She pauses, realizes that everyone's already in some version of swimwear because of the heat, and shakes her head at herself. "Okay, let's get going. Shoes or you'll burn your feet, and umbrellas might help too."

In an incredibly short period of time for how much everyone drags their feet and complains, they're out the door and in a car. Roxy had asked Callie to turn it on while she was getting everyone ready to go, so it fortunately has had the AC on for ten minutes and didn't begin to cook everyone when they sat down more than just a little bit.

Roxy drives, and the rest of the women sit as far away from each other as possible in a van the size it is. Calliope gets the passenger seat, simply because she's too large to fit in the back.

"Okay girls, we're here," Roxy says after a short-yet-too-long drive in the stifling air of the car. If they rolled the windows down, the air blowing on them was like that from a furnace.

There's a mild cheer, and the run towards the sportsplex is accompanied by the sound of flip flops hitting the ground and panting. It's 112 degrees Fahrenheit, they can't get inside the air conditioned building fast enough, and Vriska and Damara can't even wait for Roxy to pay for pool passes.

It turns out they didn't need to, because when they reach the windowed booth outside the pool room door, it's empty. The window is cracked, with mustard blood dried into the seams in a way that Callie isn't sure suggests a fist or a head.

"What . . . " she starts, but Roxy points to the scrawled in sharpie message— _ Be Right Back! _ —on the glass and then slaps down a fifty before heading into the pool room. Her cheeks are flushed and her eyes unfocused, partially from heat, partially from something that gives Calliope a feeling like bugs chittering under her skin.

Rose never even paused.

Calliope wishes then that she'd brought her cellphone, that she  _ had  _ a cellphone for that matter. Her skin wasn't picked up by touchscreens as something that was giving orders, and the ones with buttons were too small for her to use. For not the first time, she's regretting not using some of her amassed wealth and favors to get one designed that  _ would  _ work.

She wants to say that she gave an exhaustive search of the facilities for a telephone and to understand what happened, but the truth was that the longer that she spent out of sight of the band and Roxy the more worried and deeply unsettled she became, and the door had barely shut behind Roxy before she was walking through behind her.

When she gets into the pool room, she can't quite remember why her hands are shaking and her heart trembling, but Rose smiles at her and beckons for her to join them in the pool, and it doesn't matter anymore.

 

—

 

Callie is grinning absently when she's shut up in her room and the sun has gone down, body pulsing with quiet contentment. The world is quiet—no traffic, not that many people had been out lately what with the heat. Even the bugs and birds are subdued, barely audible.

After the pool she'd felt refreshed, new,  _ baptized _ . In fact, they all felt better after the pool. A thought drifts through her mind, a suggestion of a memory from this afternoon, but it's gone before she can catch it and she lets it float past without a protest.

She realizes that she hasn't talked to Kanaya since Monday, even when their last conversation had been vaguely alarming. She's too awake to sleep anyways, so she opens up her laptop and prepares a video call with her friend.

The video doesn't click on immediately, there's just the sound of static-y breathing over the speakers.

"Kanaya?" Callie asks, checking to make sure she doesn't have video muted. "I think there might be something wrong with your microphone, it's picking up some kind of weird feedback."

"Gimme a sec," Kanaya says, and Calliope frowns, the slurred words pinging around in her head like her brain is a pinball machine and they're hitting every red flag and button there.

"Okay," Calliope says hesitantly, and is about to ask if she's alright when the video cuts in.

She looks  _ awful. _

Her cheeks, always thin, have hollowed out and paled in an alarming manner. Calliope's eyes fill with Kanaya's waxy, sweating skin, the bruised green circles under her eyes that may as well be caverns, the lips normally solid shining black or opaque green chapped and a pale black that isn't quite grey but is trying its hardest to be.

"Oh, darling," Calliope breathes, reaching out a hand like she can touch her through the screen.

"Callie," Kanaya says, much too loudly, and Calliope doesn't think she's ever heard Kanaya call her anything less than her full name. "Don' feel good."

Her skin brightens and then fades in short, sharp bursts, eyes unfocused, looking past the camera, past the screen, past Callie.

"There's somethin' behin' you," she says, touching a hand to her greasy, awkwardly flattened hair. "Somethin' behin'—"

The screen goes black,  _ Call Disconnected, Please rate your call,  _ and Callie can't bring herself to move and then turns so fast that her laptop falls off the bed.

There's nothing there.

 

—

 

Sleep doesn't come easy, but Calliope knows that she can't get a bus ticket at this hour or in this town, and that the fastest and most polite route is to wait for Roxy to wake up tomorrow morning and beg a ride home a few days early for a family emergency.

Kanaya is the closest thing to a worthwhile family she's ever wanted.


	5. Friday the Thirteenth

Calliope wakes up before the sun. She couldn't sleep until four in the morning, and with how early the sun rises in the summer (and especially lately) she figures that it must be the adrenaline that leaves her well rested.

It won't take her very long to pack, and she gets to work, not bothering to fold her clothes before shoving them in the trunk. She keeps her camera out, figuring she might as well record the drive back.

(Might as well record Roxy, since she'll never see the beautiful girl who doesn't flinch from her ever again.)

She closes the trunk on her clothing and laptop, on top her emergency supply of beef jerky. Eating on the way will be faster, even if it won't taste as good. Trying to keep down any food she swallowed when she was wasting time not going to Kanaya would be impossible anyways.

Callie is lifting the bed—easier than getting on her hands and knees and a lot more effective—when a voice speaks from behind her and she drops it so suddenly it bounces and the metal bed frame creaks.

"Fuck," she says, turning with her heart in her throat.

It's Rose.

She doesn't look well, but not in the way that Kanaya didn't look well. In the sputtering light of the hallway, her platinum blonde hair looks bone white and her pale violet irises are hard to find, especially when her lids are halfway closed and a black hole in her face that forms an inexplicably sardonic twist, even though it should be impossible to comprehend emotion from the void that is her lips.

"You can't save them, you know," and her voice is a spider crawling out of your shower drain.

"What do you mean?" Callie asks. Her hands shake and her eyes don't want to focus on Rose for too long. Snatches bleed through her perception,  _ help, hide, run, _ and she feels like she's not meant to be seeing any of it.

"They're already gone," the words aren't a scream but they rip through Calliope's ear drums, piercing, and she drops to her knees, touches her suddenly slick neck, sees and smells the citrus lime burst on her fingers that is her blood.

Without knowing why, she stares at the place Rose isn't anymore, lifts her wet hand to her mouth, and licks.

 

—

 

Packing doesn't seem so important anymore, especially when she's reaching for the cooler on her floor—can't just leave a bunch of raw, slowly rotting meat in Roxy's guest bedroom—and the thing she thought was a dirty sock squirms and shrieks its way out from under the bed and over Callie's foot to nudge the lid open. _ It has too many legs,  _ she thinks dimly, and backs her way out of the room with the trunk clenched to her chest. The massive thing looks almost the size of a normal suitcase against her barrel chest.

She considers just skipping the stairs entirely and jumping over the railing, but out of concern for the floor cracking she foregoes it and takes the steps three at a time. Her toenails leave scores in the wood, she'd forgotten to put on shoes.

She doesn't notice.

Roxy is already awake, sitting on the couch, and Callie can't see her face: it’s a side view and her expression is hidden by her wildly ungroomed hair, cup of tea halfway to her mouth and not moving as she stares directly ahead at the television.

Callie wants to shake her out of her daze immediately and talk to her, but she doesn't; something compels her to look at the screen. When she does, she doesn't understand.

It has to be a mock CNN, from some kind of horror movie. She thinks, tries to remember if it's April first, but she can't, because it isn't and even if it was it wouldn't explain what's happening. The anchorwoman is standing in front of a crowd, a mass of human shaped beings with empty white eyes and black vomit bubbling with dark grey chunks out and down their chins. A little girl is screaming, eyes bruised and clutching a teddy bear that cackles in her arms. A man picks her up, tosses her back down, her head hits the concrete of the street and she stops making any noise.

The anchorwoman, who hadn't been facing the camera, turns. Her pinstriped suit matches the gray pale of her skin, and her right horn is shattered into jagged spikes, a silken web stretching over her face and between her horns and when she opens her mouth, it is the fist sized spider inside that speaks.

"We look forward to your service," she says, opening her closed eyes, teal full and dripping human blood red tears down her cheeks, pressing the spiderweb into a clumpy cement-like mixture that glues her face where it is.

This would have been less disturbing if the voice hadn't come from directly behind Calliope, and she turns, that slow horror movie rotation, but there's nothing there.

Roxy screams wordlessly, and there's the sound of a teacup hitting the floor and shattering, and Calliope turns to see that the screen is no longer of the horrific crowd and the anchorwoman. It's of them, except it's not of them—

Roxy's head is split open and Callie is hovering over her with a manic, blood stained grin, a skeletal hand dripping in blood raised to her lips as her inhuman tongue snakes around them. The circles on her cheeks are scarlet, and when her jaw unhinges to display teeth with bits of blonde hair and grey flesh caught in them, she has to leave.

Calliope takes one step back, another, even though she has to make her way  _ past  _ the sofa to get out. She turns her head away sharply from the screen, from the things on it she doesn't want to say, ears ringing with Roxy's terrified sobs, and runs through the stupid beaded curtain. It blinds her, wraps around her like the tendrils of a living being, and she rips her way free, beads spilling onto the floor and cascading down her body.

She has to get to Kanaya. None of this makes sense—it doesn't matter, nothing matters, this is just some stupid prank and everything is going to be okay as long as she can get to her friend. 

She's run miles before: she's only twenty or so away, she can get there before noon.

But as soon as she forces her way outside the front door that keeps sticking, like it doesn't want to let her out, she knows that it isn't a prank.

How often has she felt the pulsing glow of the world, the vibrancy of life in the air of a living whole in this planet she's picked as the beginning of her benevolent influence? How often has she sensed the souls of those who lived there?

She's been so wrapped up in herself lately, so obsessed with the people around her, that she hasn't even noticed her powers fading, dulling. When was the last time she sensed someone before they reached behind her, days ago?

And now, she senses nothing at all.

Or, that isn't correct. Looking at the dark sky, the white sun that provides no light but a burning hole of contrast in the sky, the cold that even Calliope can feel, ripping into her flesh and deep into her bones, she's never felt something so malevolent. It's power, it's beauty, it's grace, it's Eldritch horrors from paradox space.

The moon is purple and rotten, pestilent in the sky. She has to stop looking up, so she looks around, sees no one in the breathless empty of the abandoned world.

And then—across the street, there she is. She can't be more than four feet tall, blond hair, pink princess pajamas and a Nemo stuffed animal dangling from her hand. Calliope feels relief looking at her—the girl on tv, she'd been aware, at least until her skull was crushed in, maybe whatever it was didn’t take the children—but then the child turns. Her face has been replaced with a lamprey eel mouth, and she hisses with a forked tongue at Calliope, body crunching up before she leaps ten feet forward in an impossible burst of speed.

Calliope screams a little, guttural, afraid, unable to control the depth or pitch in her deep instinctive fear. She slams back into the house, locks the door behind her, and when she dares to look out the peephole the girl is gone.

She doesn't go back outside.

Inside the house is better, a bubble of the world that hasn't gone crazy, and Calliope can hear Roxy still having a panic attack on the sofa. She heads through the remainders of the partially destroyed beaded curtain, this time without it fighting her. Roxy is screaming in short, dry mouthed bursts, eyes wide and wild with fear.  _ Don't shoot until you can see the whites of their eyes,  _ Calliope hears in a distant, nearly forgotten voice, and wishes that comforting Roxy would be that simple.

It's faster to just rip the plug out of the wall, and she's not sure if she could find the delicacy to turn it off in her when she couldn't normally, but she pulls too hard and the electrical socket pulls out as well. It leaves a hole, wires pulled uncomfortably bare.

"Shit," Callie says, turns to face Roxy and her dry sobs, and says it once more with  _ feeling. _

She's never really had to comfort anyone—there were always other people around to do that, to take care of the wounded when she was done saving their lives, leaving her a fever dream impression on their wounded minds. But she tries now, because she'd try anything for Roxy.

Calliope kneels in front of Roxy, what she deems a safe distance away, and looks over her shell shocked eyes. She's seen more than what was on the TV. When her eyes focus on Callie she flinches back visibly, and oh—oh that  _ hurts,  _ she'd forgotten how much it  _ hurt  _ when someone did that, and with Roxy especially, who smiled at Callie's grin—

But then Roxy throws her arms around Callie, presses her face into the hard shell of Calliope's skin. From what Callie remembers of proper hugging procedure, she's supposed to wrap her arms around her in return (carefully, ever so  _ carefully)  _ and she dares to press a gentle kiss to Roxy's hair. A shiver goes through Roxy at the motion, but not in a bad way. Calliope doesn't reach out to feel her soul, doesn't want to intrude her space like that, but she wants desperately to do something more than what she is doing, which is holding her helplessly and with extreme care.

"They said things," Roxy finally gets out, undefined and unpredictable tremors in her limbs from how hard she's tensed up, ''they said things to me and they kept saying them and they wouldn't  _ stop." _

Before Callie can answer, there's a clatter, and Roxy and her jump apart like a pair of middle schoolers caught kissing under the bleachers. It's just Damara though, nearly naked form (and when had Calliope gotten used to that?) spread out on the floor and under the liquor cabinet, long arms straining to reach something.

She pulls back out, holding a plastic baggie, one of the big ones, filled with a truly epic amount of weed. Calliope isn't completely up to date on the cost or strengths of marijuana, but she's almost one hundred percent certain there's enough to overdose on in there. Before Calliope can comment, Damara is tossing it on the coffee table and going back in to come back out with an altoids case that Callie severely doubts has anything resembling altoids in it.

"Would you like some?" she asks in English, not bothering even with the choppy accent, voice simple and clear. It's bizarre to hear her speak like that, and Calliope realizes that Damara is a delicate series of defenses and lies with a complete surety that startles even herself.

Damara doesn't bother to fix the way her tube top has ridden up to be more of a scarf for the top of her boobs, and Callie finds herself incapable of caring just this once.

Callie looks at Roxy, and there's a short moment, and then they both look back at Damara and nod in tandem. Life sounds like it would be better high, and Calliope thinks there's enough there for her to actually get a buzz.

 

—

 

They get stoned, high, baked, touchy. Callie, Roxy, and Damara end up in a cuddle puddle that seems to have gained more skin and less cloth as the indeterminate amount of time went on. The clocks are frozen at three in the morning. Outside it's still dark.

"Okay, but, we need to look for, for," Roxy stares up at the ceiling, an absent finger playing at the curve of Calliope's sharp cheekbones. It feels like heaven. "For  _ Rosie."  _ she finally finds the words, grins in triumph and excitement and turns her pink eyes to share it with Callie.

Damara laughs, an ugly, mocking thing. Calliope elbows her, misjudges her own strength, sends Damara flying up against the wall. She doesn't care, even as Callie starts to apologize profusely, just slumps where she slammed into the flower wallpaper and black trim and wheezes a cackle that any fairy tale witch would be proud of.

"I don't know if that's such a good idea," Callie says as gently as she can. She doesn't want to be the one to break it to Roxy that her little sister isn't quite right in the head anymore. She doesn't know that she can do anything but. There's something wrong with Rose, and she can't explain it without reminding Roxy of the newscast that she had sat in front of and screamed for. She can't do that to her. The drugs helped her forget, but they would just draw out the fear if she remembered.

Roxy insists however, so Callie finds herself dragged through the house, searching for Rose. They don't find her, although Damara does find them several times with a smile like the Cheshire Cat in heat.

Calliope hadn't taken any of the weed, had just swallowed the entirety of the assorted narcotics in the altoid can and it glows pleasantly in a numbing way through her veins. The world seems a little bit fuzzy and a little bit distant and she doesn't want to traipse through these endless corridors and hidden doors and rooms—because there's always another hidden room, sometimes behind a literal painting, she's in Scooby Doo all of a sudden and she waits for sheet ghosts to pop up behind marble busts and more than once inquires with Roxy about her Scooby Snack—and she's  _ tired,  _ she just wants to sit down and not get up.

But the house is finally, one hundred percent, top to bottom searched, and it's been two hours they estimate and the high is starting to fade. Calliope can see Roxy working herself up to going outside, keeps subtly placing her large body to block the doorways that lead to the front door. She doesn't need to see what's out there.

Just as Roxy is about to open her mouth, and Callie is doomed, she knows as soon as the  _ please  _ tumbles from her petal pink lips she'll crumble like a giant cookie being gummed to death by a giraffe, there's a sharp whistle from the living room. When they don't get there fast enough for Damara's liking, there's another one just in time for them to clear the doorway and have it hit their ear drums full on. Roxy covers her ears in a delayed reaction, lets out a low whine that doesn't come close to matching the whistle in pitch or volume.

Damara's placed in front of the TV, eating pickles and pocky, one food in each hand. Callie has a moment of weirdness in her own body, like something is off about this picture, but Damara nods toward the askew TV and her attention is consumed by the screen and not by the way the plug dangles onto the floor and sits nowhere near an outlet.

It's CNN again, and the urgent news bar is full of nothing but corrupted words—not in content but in the ability to read it. Rose is on the screen, and when she opens her mouth in a grin her teeth are a white that has never been achieved in nature, a piece of printer paper, her lips the definition of the absence of color even as her skin glows so brightly it refracts where there should be highlights.  _ Senpai sparkles,  _ Calliope thinks distantly, horrified.

She stands before a mic, violin in hand, and this time she doesn't have the rest of the band with her to flesh out the song but she doesn't  _ need  _ them because she's transcendent in her art. Lyrics pour off her tongue and dance shapes into the air, enchanting and swaying. Inside her, even through the tv, even however many miles away, Callie can feel darkness. But darkness isn't a good enough descriptor: it is not just devoid of light, it has never  _ seen  _ light in the first place. It is the base of the ocean, 11,000 meters down, things that have no concept of  _ sight  _ crawling and squirming and wriggling nose and teeth first through the meaninglessness of time without a way to mark it.

Rose spreads her hands, and the violin in them is not anymore, and instead she wields two needles that could have been wands if they didn't look so wickedly sharp and dangerous. The void crackles around them, around her, pours from her mouth when she opens it in lieu of noise, and arcs out towards the camera. It turns, image crackling, pans over a crowd of creatures that could have been human once if you redefined the concept of humanity itself. There are frankly far more tentacles than Calliope is comfortable with, and also . . .  beaks.

Okay, she's basically looking at a crowd of calamari waiting to happen.

She doesn't know why she's thinking so blithely. Maybe it's the pills. Maybe her mind is cracking under the stress. Maybe she has to or she'll cry.

Just when she starts to feel sick to her stomach, just when she thinks that she can't take looking at them and pretending this is a joke for even a moment more, the camera swings back and Rose's lips move but the voice is vibrating from the inside of her own skull so deeply that she crashes to her knees with a suddenness and force that does what she'd feared earlier and cracks the floor boards.

**We will speak when the sky has gone black, and you will serve us.**

 

—

 

The rest of the day is spent at the bottom of a series of bottles, some prescription, some glass, and eventually holding back Roxy's hair while she pukes up pickles and Damara laughs in breathy exhales.


	6. Black Sabbath

The pulsating sick sore of a moon is gone an indefinable amount of time later, and Calliope only knows this because she watches the sky through the window when Damara and Roxy have collapsed in a puddle of their own sweat.

The world goes cold, and no amount of turning up the heat helps, just as the AC did nothing before. It's cold in a way that cuts soul deep, that Calliope can feel, and she covers Roxy and Damara in blankets and heat packs where they slumber and hopes that their shivers are nightmares and not hypothermia.

She watches the thing she thought was the sun, watches it slowly disappear and then return in a curved sweeping motion. It takes her far too long to realizes that it is an eye.

Eventually, it blinks, and it does not open again.

Calliope hears the knock on the door before she is ready for it, tightens her body in preparation, in fear, leaves where she'd been fussing over Damara and Roxy for just that much longer and heads towards it. She doesn't look through the peephole, doesn't think that she could withstand the lack of courage that would appear if she did.

She opens it to Rose, Rose who is more tentacles than girl, Rose whose light hurts the eyes of a creature made to withstand a sun without blinking.

Rose reaches out to touch her shoulder, and Calliope moves reflexively in terror, slaps the hand away so hard that it flops unnaturally on the bone of her newly fractured wrist. Rose doesn't hesitate, takes her crushed bones and ignores them, continues inexorably toward Callie. Callie's thoughts are screaming  _ not to let her touch her,  _ screaming,  _ oh dear god don't let it  _ **_touch me,_ ** but it is overrun by the way her muscles have frozen in place.

She needs to let this happen. She knows this with a clarity that frightens her.

When Rose touches her shoulder, she knows how truly  _ blind  _ she's been her entire life, how pitiably small minded and detail oriented. She's missed the entire goddamn forest for looking at the tree that is Earth, wasting her time on cultivating a termite infestation when she should have noticed the pack of wolves behind her.

The Horrorterrors weren't a Lovecraftian rip off. If anything, he was ripping off  _ them. _

_ He was a seer,  _ the knowledge in her head whispers.  _ He saw us, the same way Rose did. _

_ And now the way you do. _

Calliope takes a deep breath, smells  _ nothing  _ in a way she never has, is blindly groping in the dark of this world with a sense that is now irrelevant.

They do not come to her with a declaration of war, like she'd assumed. They are not here to conquer her.

They are here to offer a  _ plea,  _ in the only way that monsters know how.

"I'll do it," she says, shaking Rose's hand off her shoulder. "I'll protect you. But you need to leave Earth, you need to leave all the planets that you've destroyed to get here, you need to give their souls back."

Rose smiles, a secretive press of lips that is the most human thing that Callie has seen from her in days. Her hand drops from Callie's shoulder, flopping flesh trailing down the thick muscle in a way that makes her breathless with disgust.

Rose's body goes into convulsions then, and Calliope becomes mindless of her own distaste, snaps into her medical training and tugs off her own shirt to place under her head, lowering her gently to the ground and then backing away because she may want to pin her still but that's the worst thing that she could do right now.

Her mouth is frothing white and purple, and something is snaking its way out of her throat that Callie isn't quite sure is corporeal. It's that void, it ripples from her in undulous tendrils as she gags and her throat spasms around it. Callie is repulsed, wishes she didn't have to be seeing this, but it's just a horror on top of another horror and she can't put that much energy into her revulsion.

Rose gives up the ghost with a final retch, and it rips itself fully free of her with an obscene squelch. It doesn't have eyes, but it turns itself on Callie regardless, looks her up and down in an appraising manner. It isn't threatening, but it's impossible to not be intimidated by it on an instinctual level and Calliope finds her teeth bared, the low rumble of a defensive growl in the base of her chest.

It jerks back, partially as if it's afraid, mostly as if it's laughing at her, and it heads to the sky. Callie tracks it with her eyes, is in just the right position to be blinded when a harsh series of white lights fill the sky and plummet down like falling stars. The meteors streak to earth, and Callie welcomes them with a laugh, spreads her arms, closes her eyes, and tips her head back to receive the return of the souls.


	7. Sunday Fun in the Sun

The expansion of the universe is endless, and it had never occurred to anyone that there might be things beyond it that did not want to be disturbed by encroaching reality.

Well, it had occurred to Rose. It had occurred to her in a dream, when she sold the souls of those closest to her and herself in eternal servitude to some very old, very new gods.

The universe wasn't generally that accepting of anything new, especially anything as foreign as dark magic Horrorterrors that existed beyond the realms of time and physics for most of their existence. And from where they watched in that space between universes, the Horrorterrors saw that, and they saw how short their existences would be in this newfangled “time” if they were without protection.

They planned to take over their corner of the universe one world at a time, force the souls out of the bodies there and turn them into nothing but puppets for their control. It would have worked too, if it wasn't for that darn cherub.

Except that wasn't quite true.

It wouldn't have worked, and they knew that, but they were desperate. And when they approached Earth, when it came under the magnitude of their near omniscient vision, it became clear what they had to do.

A cherub was there, a being of nigh unstoppable power—the power to move and change civilizations at will, to coordinate galaxies of peace or war, and she chose to spend her days as if she was merely a mortal and not a god. She, more than anyone else could, had the power to protect them from their near inevitable fate.

Just asking this incomprehensibly benevolent being never occurred to them. It only occurred to them to take, to coerce, to destroy until she would barter with them.

Calliope will never know whether she would have given them her help without the drastic measures they pushed themselves to.

 

—

 

Callie still isn't quite convinced that these windows were made to be sat in like this, but Roxy seems so, and so she lets it slide.

The sun paints a scarlet orange brush over the sky, the first time it’s risen in an amount of time that some scientist will no doubt figure out soon. The two women with their asses sat on a windowsill on the third story and their hands centimeters from each other don't care.

"It's beautiful," Roxy says, and it's redundant, it isn't encompassing enough. Callie doesn't mind, though, when she can hear the birds, the bugs, and they chirp and sing like nothing has changed and for them maybe it hasn't. They might not have even noticed, simple soft minds that they are.

Their fingers brush, and Calliope is too tired to hold her breath at it, to feel the nerves of it in her chest.

"You know," Roxy says after a long pause, itching to fill the silence. In the distance, Callie can see a jade green car and two white-grey skinned, black haired figures inside of it. Roxy nudges her weight against Calliope's arm, draws her back to the present. "I think I finally found something worth believing in."

"Oh?" Calliope asks, a bit of curiosity perking up because in the last week there hasn't been much worth believing in.

"I figure," Roxy says, finally wraps her fingers over Callie's, "yeah, I have."

The sun is halfway over the horizon. On the streets below, people stumble and shamble back to their homes, they cling to each other when they recognize a face.  _ What happened,  _ they ask,  _ is it over? _

And it is.

**Author's Note:**

> on tumblr at [this gorgeous blog ;)](ang3lba3.tumblr.com)
> 
> Epilogue notes :) :
> 
> Jade and Rose are both okay - Rose is resting, because possession takes a horrible toll on your body. Rose put Jade to sleep with a spell, but when she expelled the horror terrors jade woke up in the garden where rose had placed her, very confused. jade is current taking care of rose until she feels well enough that she can yell at her. what rose did - helping ending the world and then specifically saving only a few select ppl without anyone's consent - will be a strain on their relationship for a long time, but they love each other far too much to ever leave the other. eventually it becomes somewhat of an inside joke between them and among the band.
> 
> Vriska is not doing too hot - she was on a vid call with rezi when it hit and when she saw rezi turn into a monster, she freaked out and drove to rezi as fast as she could (running down more than one questionable looking creature/human/troll/child on the way). this was probably a poor choice, considering when terezi smelled an intruder, she stabbed her through the back and then kind of just sat there licking the blood up while vriska slowly bled to death. long story short, vriska is now down one eye and is in the hospital for two months trying to recover. vrisrezi is still going strong.
> 
> damara is well - she's being damara, and at the end is outside waiting for Porrim. the clone like thing she was making out with was really just her from another timeline. with her specially made drugs she can play with the fabric of time in a ridiculously powerful manner, a power which she regularly abuses for hedonistic and ridiculous reasons. I don't know if you noticed, but I dropped a lil hint for red diamond porrim/damara.
> 
> kanaya is driving with porrim to see callie and damara respectively.


End file.
